#inevitable collision and aftermath so much worse

[electricbluebutterflies]

fall apart with me

Someday, years from now, every inch of her skin will be as familiar as his own. But for now, she is still so new and yet feels like home.

Or, a mid-2x06 missing scene of sorts. NSFW content ahead, part eight of standing in the same light, and also on ao3.

He's never been good at emotional connections, but this here is a damn mess even by his standards.

At least before… in the life he tries not to think about so much anymore, when things were good, before everything was taken from him… at least back then, he had hope. He forged a life with all the anchors one could ever want, and then it was brutally ripped away from him just as he was starting to get comfortable.

In contrast, Lucy is no anchor. If anything, she's a storm made flesh. So very different from what he knows, and all the more challenging for it, but perhaps this is what he needs right now. Perhaps, he thinks as they dance around each other in the hotel room from hell, this too will save him.

It already has, technically. Flynn doesn't exactly like remembering the aftermath of tragedy bingo, but the one bright spot in that horrible year was the strange woman who found him the very night he was most tempted to use his gun on himself. Some strange angel, sent from a lesser heaven to rescue him and give him new purpose. It was days before he actually read the book she gave him, but he knew within ten seconds that something lay between them.

Well, a future version of him and a past version of her. Technicalities. Whatever.

Point is, the longer this war goes on and the stranger it gets, the more Lucy looks like the human personification of his hope. He knows, though he won't admit it out loud just yet, that his past is locked and nothing he can do will change that. His future is here, with her, and it'll be a while before he fully accepts that idea but at least he knows.

Never mind that right now she's looking at him like she wants to wring his neck, despite the fact that he hasn't even done anything this time.

(Look, resting bitch face is a Thing and he's just as prone to it as she is but he's not enough of a person to interpret which side of the line is "bored" and which side is "vaguely homicidal" and he's not in the mood to outright test her.)

"How long do you think it'll take?" he asks, trying to refocus on the mission and failing.

"Probably another hour. At least." Lucy's eyes flit around the room, pausing a second too long on the bed behind them. Yeah, well, not a lot else to do here but argue with each other, might as well accept the inevitable.

"I really am sorry about-"

"Don't." Gods, the sight of her right now - back against the wall like that's her default setting in any given situation, arms crossed, glaring at him - might be the most perfect thing he's ever seen. "Whatever bullshit you're trying to fix, don't. I'll be fine."

He loves her, this woman who has so much determination and so little concept of how amazing she is. He wonders, sometimes, if he's the first person who's noticed how brightly she glows. Capable of so much, made of starlight, and yet at the same time so very human. It's been her fragile moments that have confirmed the state of his heart towards her, yes, but they are not all she is. Words are not enough for the complexities, what little he knows about her and how much he hopes to learn in the years to come.

Miracle of miracles, he wants a lifetime with her.

"I don't want to fix anything, Lucy. I just want-"

She's developing a habit of kissing him to shut him up, and he can't say he minds. The collision of her body against his is becoming familiar, the weight of her in his arms as he lifts her up just a little bit to make things more comfortable for the both of them. She fits, he can't help thinking - she's so damn small, but in a way that meshes so beautifully with him. All of this, so easy to get lost in her, so-

"We're getting predictable," she murmurs against his cheek, but it doesn't sound like she minds.

"Bed or wall?"

"We could not do this."

Shit, now he's screwed up. He has no intention of putting her down, but ruining her lipstick (gods, that was unnecessary theft but nobody's complaining here) is at least on pause.

"I didn't mean to pressure you. Just giving options. 'no' is also a valid one."

"I know. I don't… it just seems like this is what happens when we get bored. And that's a weird start for a relationship."

And so is lowkey trying to kill each other, he's halfway tempted to point out, but they got over that and they'll eventually get over this too. Until then, boredom sex is not the worst thing in the world. He can't think of many better reasons for two human beings to crash into each other, and the end results are good. At least on his end. Gods, he hasn't been sensitive enough, that's totally what this is, he did something she didn't like and now she's being passive-aggressive about it and-

"You can always say no, Lucy. And I'll remind you of that until you understand. This is not… I value you as a person, with or without this part of us."

She decides that's as good a time as any to start kissing him again, and who the hell is he to question that right now. At some point they're going to need to have a conversation about her issues, but this does not seem like the right time. No, not with hands wandering and blood rushing, not now at all.

He lays her down on the bed and it's like he's seeing her for the first time, glorious underneath him. Hell, this may be the only time they ever get to do these things on a decent mattress, he's letting himself enjoy the view and the details. The little noises she makes as he undoes her layers, too soft to count as whimpers but so content as she closes her eyes and trusts him. That detail, perhaps more than anything else, confirms how far they've come. It's been over a year sine the first time they had sex because they were stuck in a hotel room with nothing better to do, but the tone is so different now. She is no longer an enigmatic challenge he has to work around because he can't bear to actually get rid of her; no, she has blossomed into a flesh-and-blood woman he loves and fights alongside and she is so much better in that role than he could've dreamed.

There is no note-taking this time, none of the weaknesses he's let himself display in the past. Sure, there are still a lot of things he doesn't know about Lucy and her responses and a couple of scars he's not sure how to ask about, but they have time. Gods, he will sacrifice what little he has left if that's what it takes, he will-

"You still there?"

Amazing, how the balance has shifted and he is now the one who spaces out at bad times. He snaps back into the moment and wonders for a brief heartbeat if she would be okay if they hit pause here and just held each other. Certain parts of his body aren't exactly fond of that idea, but he has survived worse hells and-

"Yeah. Still here."

Screw it. She wants him, and he's responsive, and they can catch up on more innocent activities once they're back in their cage. While they're free, they should use that freedom well.

She is beautiful beneath him, beautiful as he kisses her and enters her and drowns in everything she is. So many mistakes led them to this moment, and so many more are yet to come - life with her will never be quiet, even after they win, but he has no desire for that anymore. Not when he could have this instead.

Lost again, he allows her to roll their bodies and lets her lead.

There will be countless nights like this, he tells himself as he kisses her neck. Someday, years from now, every inch of her skin will be as familiar as his own. But for now, she is still so new and yet feels like home and-

She crosses the edge so quietly that he barely notices until she collapses in the aftermath, and he follows in as similar a way as he can.

"You got me out of this dress, you're getting me back into it," she mutters, kissing him before getting up off the bed and retrieving her slip.

"Of course."

And as he pushes her hair out of the way and wonders if all the buttons are actually necessary, he doesn't mind at all.

All of this, given time, he will get used to.

#garcy #ebf writes fic #samelightfic #are y'all sick of me yet??

[hollyschnolly]

So, I'm not exactly great at poetry, and I wrote this in about 5 minutes at a time I should have been sleeping, but this is essentially how I feel about the attack in London yesterday, and all similar attacks:

There is a moment when things go wrong. The moment someone sweeps a glass Smoothly off a table. It seems to move in slow motion, as you stand Helpless to stop it.

Your chest constricts to control you with panic The anxiety of knowing the horror But being unable to help.

The glass creates a perfect reflection Of your fear And you don't recognize it to be you.

The inevitable moment of impact. It changes the dynamic of the situation. You feel the glass break, hear it shatter, See it explode, Into tiny fragments of what it was.

The predicted aftermath. You are left with the shards of glass Sharp enough to open your flesh At one touch. Red would stain the ground as blood dripped from your finger. What you have now, Is a hazard.

The fear perpetuates itself Because it happened before So it must persist And this paranoia Leads to the controlled carelessness That causes the injury.

You try to convince yourself That you're not afraid.

You stare at the shards As fragmented As yourself

Yet here you are. In the seconds before collision. You brace yourself for the worst. You wish you could have prevented it. You wish you didn't feel so helpless.

I hate reading about violence and terror on the news, not just because it makes existing anxiety a heck of a lot worse, but also because it makes me sad. That's obvious, isn't it? That reading about innocent people being needlessly killed will make you sad? It gets to the point where you want to just shut it out or ignore it, so that you could stop feeling the sadness, but you can't become apathetic, because that's almost as bad as complacency. You can't stop being sad about things that are supposed to hurt, because if you do that, then you lose yourself. What you should do, is take the pain and the anger, and accept it for what it is. Allow yourself to hurt, but allow yourself to continue. Don't let the pain turn into fear or hate; turn it into love. As much as you can for as many people as you can; love. I'm so so sorry to everyone affected by these horrific events, but you are strong and brave and kind and loving, and you will get through this. I'm sorry.

#OneLoveManchester

[argorpg-blog]

CONGRATULATIONS and welcome to the crew of the Argo II, ROSE! The Gods have spoken: welcome aboard AMARUS, known as KIT ALEXANDER, with a faceclaim of AVAN JOGIA. Please take a look at our checklist, and send in your account in the next 24 hours.

ADMIN NOTES: Rose! The amount of detail and thought you put into your app was just astounding. Those little bits of color and extra thought (”plum carpet”!!) managed to make Kit a three dimensional, complex character to fall in love with. We were both absolutely blown away by the way you managed to convey his bitterness and complication with the gods without making it seem too overdone. We love Kit, and we’re excited to see him here!

OUT OF CHARACTER

NAME/ALIAS: Rose AGE, TIMEZONE, PRONOUNS: 20, GMT, she/her ACTIVITY  & EXTRAS: I’m a university student who also works part-time, so I’m a busy bee lol. But I always find time to write so I should be around lurking pretty much always, and if not here for replies everyday, then every other day or so. Also I’ve kinda fallen in love with this rp, you’ve done a fantastic job.

IN CHARACTER

DESIRED SKELETON: Amarus CHARACTER NAME: Kit Alexander AGE & GENDER: 25, cismale, he/him FACECLAIM: Avan Jogia, Matthew Daddario, Ezra Miller

BIOGRAPHY:

Fortune favored the bold. Your father might have been bold once- must have been to have endeared himself to a deathless goddess who walked the world with wind in her hair, dispensing luck with a brush of her fingers and a heady smile. But you knew him in the aftermath of that intoxication. Luck left your father, but he’d already fallen headfirst into her thrall. Your earliest memories are of sitting at your father’s feet, halfway under the table, tiny fists clenched around a toy car as men who seemed larger than life roared at a television across the room, money changing hands. The plum colored carpeting of your living room caught the wheels of your car, but the tile of the place where your father leaned over the counter and wrote checks in his tightly looping script was better, even though you were told off when the toy’s tiny plastic wheels left marks on the walls. Your father would strap you into the car, pressing a kiss on the top of your head and whispering that you were his lucky charm.

School was when you first discovered other children. Before then it had been you and your father, the men who came to the little home you shared to yell as if the horses, or dogs, or baseball players who flickered on the tv could hear, and grumble as bills were passed across the table, the men who looked over their counters to smile down at you, asking you questions as you slipped to safety behind your father’s legs. You didn’t know how other kids worked, didn’t know the right things to say or do. It didn’t help that your father’s luck, a fickle, nebulous thing, swung your lives between poverty and excess with seemingly no rhyme or reason. Children weren’t kind to silent little boys who came to school in threadbare clothes but with the newest gameboy tucked in their bags, more inclined to speak in whispers to adults than learn the latest skipping game than dominated the playground. Teachers were at a loss as to what to do with little boys who seemed to take innately to math- reeling off probability as if was second nature- but hardly spoke to anyone.

In a life dictated by your father’s fortune, the infectious joy of his successes buoyed you between the dark periods when a gamble didn’t go his way. Being someone’s lucky charm only earns you praise until their luck fails. Betting evolved from a hobby, a diversion, to an occupation by the time you were old enough to compare your life to those of your classmates and find it lacking. Maybe that was why your father’s fortune took a sharp turn for the worse when you were eight, and watching mothers pick up their children as you sat in front of school, heart leaping every time you thought you saw your father’s car. A string of losses led to the loss of the house with the plum carpet, the loss of the comforting weight of your father’s hand on your head, the whispered assertion that you were his joy, his happiness, his lucky charm.

But fortune hadn’t forsaken all those around you. A girl who shared her snack with you did a perfect cartwheel at recess. The cat who lived in the apartment next to the one you and you father had eventually left the back of the car for narrowly avoided the wheels of a speeding truck as it sauntered off, leaving you wide-eyed from where you had been crouched in the gutter, petting it. While you sat, swinging your legs, at the kitchen table of the old lady who lived downstairs and tutted until you agreed to come in for a slice of cake, she found her wedding ring down the back of a chair. It had been lost for years. She’d cried, pulled you into a hug, called you lucky. You’d smiled, shoveled the rest of the cake into your mouth, turned tail and ran.

When you were fourteen, limbs made to look even ganglier by clothing that was inevitably too short, you decided that the universe demanded balance and you were its scapegoat. A turn of good luck for those around you was more often than not your misfortune. Even when you saw the first monster, your voice breaking around a scream at the eyes and the teeth and the smile, sprinting down the road, weaving around obstacles, you pushed against a man, who stumbled away and out of the path of a bucket of paint falling from a window a level above the sidewalk. He was saved a nasty concussion, at the very least, but you were slowed by the collision. Within the block the thing had you in it’s claws, fingers boring punctures into your arm, bruises blooming almost immediately. You’d wiggled free, loosing your jacket as you kicked and writhed, and when you fell hard back to the ground it might have been luck that put a brick within arm’s reach. Might have been luck that saw the brick’s arching trajectory straight into the creature’s yellow eye. But it just as easily could’ve been coincidence, and the good aim that had you picked early in P.E. despite your reputation as a pariah. You didn’t put much stock in luck, anyway.

Your father noticed the loss of the jacket more than the blood that stained your sleeve, and the bruises that steadily turned purple, then green, then yellow. You grew even warier than you had been, keeping your back to walls and keeping to yourself. It didn’t help. The next monster chased you for further than you had ever run, pushed you out into the edges of the city where you passed empty storefronts without really seeing them. By the time you stopped running, when you couldn’t have run any more, the monster was gone- where and since when you couldn’t have guessed. It was there, slumped against the wall of an abandoned strip mall full of shattered glass and trash trapped in dying weeds, that your mother came to you for the first time.

Fortuna smiled, and you were caught between laughing and crying, between confusion and anger, dark humor and utter exhaustion.

Going to Lupa was a better alternative than continuing to try your luck with your father, who had increasingly begun to pretend you didn’t exist. Camp Jupiter, where you weren’t chased by monsters and disappointment, was better than peeling linoleum and empty stares. The Romans welcomed you with open arms- a son of Fortuna was a good sign, a good addition to any legion, a source from which to take good favor as if it were nothing. When war came knocking, and the demigods stormed Mount Othrys like so many child soldiers, you were there. You’d thrown yourself into training, trying to dig out a place for yourself by your own merit, but you’d never be as gifted with a sword as a child of Mars, as tactically minded as one of Minerva. When you were there at the defeat of Krios, watching people you’d known for years be wounded, die, you were there as a lucky charm.

Your mother was beloved, feasts were held for her, and yet when you looked at the tattoo that held her symbol it was with a resentment that was unshakable. As the lines under your tattoo signifying your years in the legion multiplied, you surrounded them with art snaking up and down your arms that had nothing to do with your mother or the other gods and goddesses whose children were nothing but pawns in a greater game. You smothered the implication of your loyalty with flowers and vines, animals and symbols. But you didn’t bother to smother your cynicism. And all people saw was the outstretched, kind hand of luck regardless.

FATAL FLAW/DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC:

Amarus- bitter

Kit has never been shy about his distrust of the gods. As far as he’s concerned, the entire pantheon is full of dysfunctional and manipulative egotists, and the Romans are tragically deluded in their devotion. Even before he discovered the truth of his parentage and all that that meant, he was already skeptical of luck- the thing that just so happened to be his birthright, and utterly inescapable. That his childhood was so consumed by the fickleness of fortune made him bitter from the start- when he arrived at Camp Jupiter as a long-legged fourteen year old it was with tired eyes and a prematurely jaded attitude.

His bitterness made him ambivalent for years, but since he’s gotten older it’s morphed into something harder. To let himself be buffeted around by the whims of his mother and the rest of the gods and goddesses is to let them win. Kit is no optimist, but he’s fighting for something better regardless of the fact that losing seems inevitable. He’s driven by resentment, and it could very easily be his downfall.

Entwined as his future is with the gods and goddesses as well as his fellow demigods, it’s only a matter of time that his derision of the divine sparks with someone’s quick temper. His distrust is so invasive that he’s wary of any help the gods try to extend to anyone, regardless of the situation. In terms of character growth and development, this could definitely change, but his reasons for accepting the call to arms in this quest are decidedly not born of any loyalty to his mother.  

EXTRAS:

cultivated contention: I’d like to explore Kit’s interactions with the Greek demigods relating to the feud and separation that the gods created between the two groups. For him, it’s just another in a string of manipulations and lies coming from the careless pantheon, it’ll be interesting to see how he responds to this once his knee-jerk reaction to be friendly with the Greeks just to spite the gods wanes.

fundamental differences: In a world so concentrated in the godly, Kit defines himself through his distrust of the gods. I’d like to see him befriending someone who’s on this quest for all the right reasons despite this completely different worldview.

in the end, all there is is luck: Exploring Kit’s response to any sort of intervention or aid from his mother would be very interesting. Depending on the situation it could be philosophy-shifting.

#accepted